As my Amazon Echo turns 3 months old, certain commands have bubbled up to the surface and become routine parts of my day. These are my favorites Echo commands (and what they do).

“Alexa, turn the lights on” / “Alexa, turn the lights off”
Alexa turns my Philips Hue lights on and off by request – see my Hue review here.

“Alexa, start a timer for 30 minutes”
Useful for numerous things including, but not limited to: cooking, laundry, hair dyeing, calling Mom in X minutes, and time-boxing tasks.

“Alexa, how much time left on the timer?”
Particularly useful since there’s no clock displayed.

“Alexa, play playlist Sleepy Time”
I listen to this playlist as I fall asleep every night. I had to first create and populate the playlist in Amazon Music, but it after I set it up it was instantly available for my Amazon Echo to find by name and play from.

“Alexa, set a sleep timer for 45 minutes”
Alexa turns off the music when the sleep timer expires. The sleep timer doesn’t ring any alarms, as long as you’re careful to not accidentally set a normal timer instead (like I did once. Once.)

“Alexa, what time is it?”
Sounds silly since I’m usually facing a phone or a computer, but in the middle of the night I’ve used this as the laziest timepiece ever.

“Alexa, trigger bedtime lights”
Activates an IFTTT recipe I created that turns my three Hue lamps to a purple hex code #5353c6 (it’s easy to hook up IFTTT to Echo, go here and follow the steps)

“Alexa, trigger find my phone”
Activates another IFTTT recipe I created that calls my phone.

Of course, there’s tons more you can do with an Echo (see my more detailed review here), these are just the phrases I tend to use over and over.